“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.” – Ray Bradbury

Tag Archives: The Devil’s Coattails

“Dying to Forget” by Sunni K. BrockFrom The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. NolanCycatrix Press, 2011

In which we meet a man named Tim as he is hopping from consciousness to consciousness, inhabiting the bodies of random people in their final moments of life. The guilty lover with a rope around his neck; the sword swallower with a fatal tickle in his nose; the blind man with a faulty heart…he’s there for all of them, experiencing death with them – or, perhaps, for them. No one wants to die, but Tim is able to push through the experience multiple times – until he looks in a mirror during one of his “stops” and sees a familiar face staring back at him. Suddenly, Tim is no longer interested in riding the wave to the next death. Suddenly, he decides to take matters, and fate, into his own hands.

“Dying to Forget” is a compact, economical sucker punch of a story with a touching and surprisingly poignant ending. No matter how you may feel about editors who include their own work, or the work of a relative or loved one, in something they produce (Sunni Brock is editor Jason Brock’s wife), there’s no doubt that this particular tale is a snug fit in this collection.

Earl Hamner Jr. created two well-known television shows from the 1970s, Falcon Crest and The Waltons. This might make his appearance in an anthology of dark fiction a bit surprising, but it’s less of a surprise when you realize that his other writing credits include eight episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Subject matter notwithstanding, Hamner’s story “The Woods Colt” has more of a Waltons vibe than a Twilight Zone vibe. It feels a bit old-fashioned in pace and execution; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a bit jarring when held against some of the edgier content found in The Devil’s Coattails up to this point.

The story centers around a man named Fletcher who has returned to the family home for one last look around before it’s out of his life for good. His mother has died, and with his father and sister also gone, Fletcher is left alone at last to get ride of this bastion of bad experiences and memories. Unfortunately for him, his presence stirs up some otherworldly presences, and Fletcher finds that there are still family secrets to be told – and blame to be assigned.

It’s not a bad story, but it lacks a little something needed to make it more memorable. To me, haunted house stories require a ton of atmosphere to work, and the house in question needs to feel like a character in and of itself. That doesn’t happen in “The Woods Colt,” leaving it a pleasant but largely forgettable read.

Jokes end in punch lines. Flash fiction often ends in a punch – a final stinger of a sentence that brings the story home. “Interrogation” has just such a line, and while it may draw a chuckle from the reader, it will likely be of the uneasy, I-shouldn’t-laugh-but-I’m-laughing variety.

Richard Christian Matheson wrings maximum impact from a minimal word count, telling a complete story with a sharp twist in a fraction of the space that other, lesser stories fill. It would take me even less time to spoil the whole thing, which I absolutely refuse to do. Reading “Interrogation” for yourself will take roughly the same amount of time to read as this review, and it will be infinitely more rewarding. Let’s leave it at that.

“I never seen a cat fight back like Ma,” says the narrator of Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Cattiwampus.” Her Ma is actually fighting back against her Pa, an abusive man who finally pushes too far. They’ve fought before, but Ma has always been able to keep herself in check. This one last time, though, she loses control, and as a result she’s forced to gather up her children and go into hiding.

Ma is no ordinary woman. She’s a shapeshifter, and she’s lived her life in fear of two things: losing control, and passing her curse down to her children. Now she’s done the first thing, and as the family ekes out an existence in the harsh wilderness of the Appalachians, signs are beginning to appear that she may have done the second thing, too.

Tem based this story on an actual Appalachian folktale, and he maintains that sense of place here with his vivid descriptions and liberal use of the vernacular. I love it when talented authors take on folktales and legends, and Tem takes this simple, common premise and wrings something special out of it.

“Barrels Ready?” is a short essay in which Norman Corwin (a respected essayist, journalist, and radio drama scriptwriter and director) reminisces about a colorful character from his past, a man determined to bring attention to a new sport he invented, a cumbersome-sounding affair in which men would race wheelbarrows loaded with cans full of ashes. The winner of said event would be the man who completed the course without spilling his ashes. Corwin, who was working at the time as a reporter for the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, covered the story, only to discover much later that the “sport” may not have been as unique as its “inventor” believed.

This one’s a real head-scratcher. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a well-written, enjoyable read; a nice little slice of nostalgia, the likes of which used to run in newspaper columns all the time (back when newspapers really were interested in covering the entirety of the community, not just the bloodiest, most sensational aspects of it). But its inclusion here, in this collection of horror fiction and other dark writings, is a little puzzling to me. Perhaps there’s some reason, some connection that’s going over my head, but I confess that as of now I don’t see it.

“On the First Day” by James Robert SmithFrom The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. NolanCycatrix Press, 2011

Norris Atwell is a Defense Intelligence Agency assassin with the peculiar hobby of collecting “last lines,” or the final words of his targets. Most recently he successfully took down a man named Terrence Thackery, a pseudo-philosopher whose work graced the self-help shelves in the bookstores and the late-night infomercials on cable TV. This was not the kind of guy Atwell’s bosses usually targeted, but Thackery’s teachings of late had drawn a huge following, and his end-time prophecies were beginning to have a serious impact on society and, more importantly, the economy.

Atwell, the consummate professional, did his job, but not before taking in Thackery’s last lines – words that have resonated with him more than he expected. Those words continue to haunt him as his daughter wakes one morning with an ominous declaration: “No one can go outside.”

As you can see, “On the First Day” has an intriguing premise, and I was excited about its potential. However, while the idea is good, the execution left me a little wanting. Smith’s style is a little too formal and stiff for me, and the dry prose really kept me from engaging with the story and the characters like I wanted to. Smith has written and published a great deal, but this is my first encounter with his work so I’m not sure if this is his usual style or something he felt best suited this particular story. Either way, the stilted dialogue and matter-of-fact descriptions didn’t work for me at all, making this particular story a hard one to recommend.

“Too Good to be Human” by J. BrundageFrom The Devil’s Coattails edited by Jason Brock and William F. NolanCycatrix Press, 2011

It’s all but impossible for me to categorize “Too Good to be Human,” and that’s one of the things I like about it. There are elements of sci-fi in this story about….something that is taking over humans, replicating themselves based on their host and then gobbling up the remains. Obviously, given that description, there’s more than a little horror in its DNA as well. There’s also some spot-on observations about the cruelty of office politics, and the way that adults are often reluctant to leave the cliquish behavior we learn in high school behind.

This is a really odd, off-kilter piece of writing that’s best left to discover as it unfolds on the page – hence, my avoidance of any real plot summary. It seems like it might be more at home in a dark sci-fi collection than one that’s titled more like a straightforward horror collection, but the more I dig into The Devil’s Coattails the more I understand that the editors had a much broader idea in mind while putting it together. More and more, that’s bearing out to have been a very good decision.